911: The Complete Series

by Grace Hamilton

  “You know Marr killed herself, right?” he asked. “We were there; we saw it. She didn’t bravely rally when her nightmare predictions came true,” Parker said. “She fucking ate her gun and left her faithful to fend for themselves.”

  “Yeah,” Ava answered. “So you can stop acting as if you have her hand up your ass like a puppet.”

  Maggie’s face twisted in fury and she swung around toward Ava, her eyes dark shiny marbles. She went for the pistol in her jeans and Finn lifted the Mossberg, but Parker stepped forward, closing the distance between them, and took his fist and smashed it into Maggie’s jaw. His ex-wife crumpled under the blow and dropped to the ground.

  22

  Parker bent and snatched the pistol before she could recover. Three minutes earlier, and that punch might have been something darker, something more cathartic, something biblical in its punishment. Now, he felt none of that. He’d stopped someone from killing Ava. That was all.

  He handed the pistol to Ava. “Do not shoot her,” he warned. “I don’t think Sara’s ready to see her mother murdered in front of her eyes.”

  Maggie glared up at them from the floor. “Wow,” Finn said. “If looks could kill, et cetera, et cetera.”

  “Oh, Mom,” Sara whispered, a small sob escaping her lips. She addressed Parker without looking at him. “What do we do with her? She can’t be allowed to warn the remaining section leaders at the Vineyard.”

  “In the cellar,” he said, “I have left-over equipment from when I was still a cop, including handcuffs.” He turned to Ava. “Take the lantern and go down there. There’s a 5.11 Tactical belt down there on the workbench, too. It has two sets of cuffs with keys on the belt hook. Bring them up. It’s a start.”

  “I don’t know what a ‘5.11 Tactical’ is,” Ava pointed out.

  “It’s the belt with the cop gear hanging off it,” Parker answered. “You won’t miss it.”

  Maggie glowered at him, but Finn kept the cavernous muzzle of the Mossberg pointed at her face. She looked at once sick and grimly determined, and Parker noticed her finger, white from stress, was hard on the trigger.

  “Easy, Finn,” he said. “Take your finger off the trigger and lay it straight against the guard. You don’t want to pull it by accident.”

  Finn nodded before slowly inching her finger off the trigger.

  “That thing looks like a cannon in your hands,” Sara pointed out.

  “It gives me a real feeling of security,” Finn replied. “I’m not exactly someone who’s had a lot of experience with firearms. This seems to balance out my lack of practice.”

  Sara looked impressed. “Good to know.”

  Ava took the lantern and began to descend into the cellar. Her shout of, “Oh, my God, I think I’ve gone to prepper heaven!” made Parker smile as he took his mini-Maglite out of his pack and turned it on, keeping the light shining on Maggie’s face to blind her.

  “Hold the light while I search her,” he told Sara. “She may have a hold-out on her ankle or behind her back, or a knife in her pocket.”

  “Or some eye of newt and wing of bat for casting spells,” Finn muttered.

  “Screw you, Calamity Jane,” Maggie growled.

  “And my little dog, Toto, too?” Finn asked.

  “Are you armed, Maggie?” Parker asked. He handed the light to Sara, who took it. Her hand was only shaking a little bit now.

  “Find out for yourself,” Maggie replied. “It’s the only way you’re ever going to get your hands on me again.”

  “Once upon a time that was something that was very important to my idea of happiness,” he admitted. He squatted down beside her. “But not anymore, Maggie. I like this less than you do.”

  “I hate you, James,” Maggie said. “I so fucking hate you.”

  “Please, Mom,” Sara begged, her voice close to breaking. “Shut up.”

  Ava came back then and Parker took the cuffs from her. Maggie lay on the floor at his direction and looked up at him. “Turn over,” he told her.

  “Or what?” she asked. “You’ll hit me again?”

  “He might not,” Ava said. “But I sure will.”

  Maggie scowled at Sara, but seeing that she’d get no help from her daughter, she rolled over onto her stomach and held her hands behind her back. Kneeling, Parker placed the handcuffs on her and then quickly frisked her for weapons, coming up empty.

  “Someone has to stay up here and watch her,” Parker said. “And the front of the cabin, for that matter.”

  “I’ll stay,” Finn said. “Sara needs to be with you and I’m half-afraid of what Ava will do if she’s left alone with this bitch.”

  “All right,” Parker agreed. “We’ll go down, resupply, and get on the move.” He looked at Sara. “I need to know you’re going to be okay,” he said.

  She still looked upset, but not in shock or panicked. She’d just shot two men in cold blood because it’d been practical. He imagined her adrenaline response was surging through her body even now. She turned her eyes to him.

  “I waited for you to come, Daddy,” she said. “I kept thinking you’d find me.” Her voice had softened as though she was remembering the little girl she’d once been, before her mother had introduced her to the Church.

  Parker felt something sharp unhitch in his chest, and he didn’t try to fight the tears this time as they cascaded silently down his face. He was too afraid to touch her again, to comfort her; he was still a stranger to her, and certainly not the man she remembered.

  At a loss for what else to do, he opened his arms. It felt like a miracle as she came to him, but he hugged her tight and her grip back was fierce on his body. She clung to him and he buried his face in her shoulder, breathing her in, feeling the connection rebuilding between them.

  “I tried to find you, baby,” he said. “I tried.”

  After a moment, they broke apart, looking at each other. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Finn sniffling. Ava simply glared at Maggie, looking ready to carve her up. Maggie, for her part, continued scowling at them all, seething. I don’t know this woman at all, he thought. Maybe I never did.

  “We have to get moving,” he said, voice gentle.

  Sara wiped her eyes. She looked at Parker and gave him a tight smile before nodding. “Let’s do it,” she said.

  Suddenly, every person in the room turned toward the door as the sound of diesel engines approaching reached the cabin. The noise of grinding gears echoed up in mechanical growls, identifying the troop carriers coming up the access road.

  “Watch her!” Parker told Finn.

  “Like I want anything to do with the Council,” Maggie said. “Give me a gun!”

  Finn lifted the shotgun and pointed it at Maggie as the woman climbed back up to her feet. Parker went to the door of the cabin and threw it open. Immediately, rifle fire came out of the woods and chewed up the door next to his head. He ducked back inside.

  “They have scouts in place,” he shouted.

  Ava went to the window next to the door and fired her M4 through it. Answering gunfire punched into the cabin and she ducked away.

  “Get down!” Parker shouted.

  Everyone hit the floor, and Maggie made a break for the other side of the cabin where the kitchen was. Outside, the Council unit unleashed hell on the structure. M2 .50 caliber machine guns opened up from opposite points and raked the building in a withering crossfire. Bullets tore through the room, leaving a devastating trail of destruction in their wake.

  23

  The acrid smell of gunpowder cloaked the room as bursts of wood dust hung in the air over fragments of window glass, which lay everywhere, scattered on the floor along with furniture splinters. Parker looked around in the lull from the firing. Ava was down on the floor, Finn on top of her, both of them wild-eyed and panicked from the surprise adrenaline rush.

  He turned his head and saw Sara frantically yelling, “Mom,” a stunned expression splashed across her face. He saw what her eyes were locked on t
hen, and swore. Maggie lay on the floor, leaking blood.

  Parker, crawled toward the kitchen and saw that Maggie was still alive, but she’d been struck several times in the torso and was bleeding heavily.

  “Finn,” he shouted. “Cover the door! Ava, keep low, but cover the windows!”

  Turning back to his ex, he could see that her shirt was soaking through with her blood. Sara crouched down next to him, openly weeping. Maggie was dying, and the Council would sooner hang her from what was left of his porch than see that she received medical attention.

  The sound of Sara’s sobs as much as what lay before them brought up a sudden rush of anger and bitterness in him for this woman he’d loved, who’d said she loved him. And who’d hurt him worse and in more ways than any other person or event in his life. But she was Sara’s mother, and he found that it still very much meant something to him.

  “Hold on, Maggie,” he said.

  He didn’t know what else to say. He needed to help cover the entrance points to the cabin, in case an assault followed the initial barrage, but he couldn’t leave her handcuffed as she bled out in front of their daughter.

  “Get her loose,” he told Sara, fishing the key out of his pocket and handing it to her.

  Then he took his carbine in hand, still expecting an entry team to hit the door. For long seconds, nothing happened. Sara cried silently, futilely pressing her hands over Maggie’s wounds in a vain attempt to staunch the flow of blood, and Parker crept back toward the entrance.

  “Hello to the house!” a male voice called over a bullhorn. “Come out peaceably and you might live.”

  “We have one of yours in here,” Parker called out. “She needs safe passage out.”

  “Dad! No. I’m not leaving you and mom,” Sara told him from her position by Maggie.

  “Way to throw us under the bus, Parker,” Ava replied.

  “We are seriously outgunned. If Sara is out there, she has a chance to save the girls at the Vineyard and possibly even us. We need to look at all of our options here.”

  The man with the bullhorn spoke up. “My orders are to retrieve a Sara Parker but there’s no specifics as to dead or alive.”

  “Shit! Get to the cellar,” Parker said working to keep the hysteria out of his voice. He needed to keep everyone as calm as possible.

  “We’ll be trapped,” Ava protested.

  “We’re trapped now—trapped and exposed if they cut loose like that again, or use grenades.”

  In his mind, he saw the Stryker and felt fear clench his stomach. He was going to have to repeat his actions from when he’d been cornered in the gas station. And get lucky all over again.

  “What about Mom?” Sara asked.

  “I’m waiting,” the voice outside called out.

  “Not without a guarantee of safe passage for Sara and treatment for our wounded,” Parker yelled back motioning to the girls to hurry.

  “You aren’t in a position to negotiate. You have until the count of five to come out with your guns down and your hands up. One!”

  “Hurry!” Parker ordered. “Go, go, go!”

  Ava and Finn began crawling on their bellies toward the opening in the floor.

  “Two!”

  Parker turned to Sara.

  “Help me drag her! Grab her collar and pull.”

  “Three!”

  Parker wrapped a fist in Maggie’s shirt and began dragging her on her back, along the floor toward the cellar trapdoor.

  “Hold on, Maggie,” he said again.

  “Four!”

  She left a long, broad smear of her blood on the floor as they dragged her, both of them straining with the awkward lack of leverage. Maggie moaned with the pain from her wounds.

  “Five! Times up.”

  The .50 cals opened up again. Gunfire chewed through the walls, cracking wood to powder and punching through the air above their heads in thunderclaps. In the next moment, the pneumatic hammering of light machine guns and assault rifles joined the deadly cacophony.

  Parker and Sara finally reached the trapdoor, their hearts pounding with fear and exertion.

  “Help her down!” he shouted above the din.

  Ava and Finn immediately began assisting Sara with the mortally wounded woman.

  Parker rolled sideways, doing his best to stay below the level of the bullets slicing through the air above him. Taking two smoke grenades out of his pack, he tossed pack down into the cellar, pulled the pin on one and lobbed it through a shattered window on one side of the cabin before tossing the other grenade out an opposite window.

  Rolling back again, he slid through the opening in the floor, his feet searching for purchase on the rings of the short ladder. Tossing his last M18 smoke grenade into the center of the room, he took a final look at the cabin that had featured so prominently in his memories of happier times. The fuckers had destroyed it. Fueled by the purest hatred, he fired a long, ragged series of bursts in the direction of the front door, in the hopes of delaying possible entry. Finished, he ducked down and locked the trapdoor with a series of heavy bolts from the cellar side. It was time to make his ex-wife as comfortable as possible as she died.

  The downstairs chamber was the most impressive room in the cabin. It served as supply cache, arms room, medical center, emergency larder, workshop, and equipment storage room.

  Among other things, there were two generators and a HAM radio in homemade Faraday cages, two metal cabinets filled with firearms, a reloading bench, and a worktable below a wall of hand and power tools. In another corner, two industrial model water purifiers stood next to a six-foot-high pallet of MRE boxes.

  Ballistic vests hung on the wall beside high-end Zeiss binoculars and tactical web gear built to hold pistol holsters, spare magazines, and various other items. On shelves built into the walls, rows of freeze-dried and canned goods stood as pristine as if they’d just been delivered to a Wal-Mart. Next to those shelves was an open locker stacked with clothing. It looked as if he’d bought stock in 5.11 Tactical, too, as he had several Gore-Tex windbreakers, dozens of pants, BDU tops and shirts, as well as three boonie hats.

  In the final corner, a pristine coal furnace sat next to a chute sealed and rubber-fitted by a metal plate. Beneath it were several dozen fifty-pound bags of clean-burning coal.

  “I’m not sorry…” Maggie said, coughing and then grimacing in pain. “For anything.”

  The vehemence of her words took Parker aback. He hadn’t intended to chastise or recriminate her now; it wasn’t the time, in about a dozen different ways.

  “It doesn’t matter now,” he said, his voice surprisingly gentle.

  She shook her head and then spent eight or ten seconds coughing before she swiped at the blood on her lips. Her eyes were fever-bright.

  “It matters, to me,” she said, her voice a heavy whisper. “Marr was right. I was right.”

  “You could have told me,” he said.

  He made to look at her wounds, but she pushed his hand away, her strength almost gone. Her clothes were so soaked with blood that she looked like a butchered animal.

  “You wouldn’t have believed.” It was a flat, declarative fiat. “And it would have been worse if you had because you were part of the system, and you still believed in that, too, and any whisper of the Church’s true purpose would have been the end of our marriage.”

  “So you stole our child and hid her from me,” Parker replied. “And you still left me. How was this better?” His anger was returning.

  She nodded. “And I’d do it again,” she told him, ignoring his question. Even in her weakened state, she sounded resolute, as if her decision was somehow mightier than any question of family or love. She tried to sit up, but collapsed back to the floor. “There’s no time for that discussion anyway.”

  He looked her in the eyes, hating her, and in a way, still loving her. “No,” he said. “There isn’t.”

  “The Church has a way out,” Maggie told him.

  “Way out of wha
t, Mom?” Sara asked. She held Maggie’s hand.

  “The country,” Maggie said.

  “Across the border?” Parker asked. “To Canada?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?” Finn asked.

  Parker cocked his head. Above them, the shooting had stopped, and he heard a garbled voice over the bullhorn, the words unintelligible.

  “We don’t have a lot of time,” he said, his voice soft.

  Sara looked up, her eyes burning with fury at the implications of his words, but Maggie squeezed her daughter’s hand.

  “He’s right, baby,” she said. “And I’m so, so sorry I didn’t protect you better.” The tears building in her eyes were not from physical pain. “Everything I did, I did for you. You have to believe that.”

  Unable to speak, Sara nodded quickly, her own tears spilling down her face.

  It’s a time of blood and tears, Parker thought suddenly.

  Maggie spoke more rapidly, though the effort obviously cost her. “Listen,” she said. “Because the provisional government has the need for so many electronic parts, they’re allowing the UN mission in Canada to ship relief supplies in by a single railroad system. The train is part of our underground and will smuggle you across the border.”

  “Ava,” Parker said, snapping her to attention, “we have to beat the clock. We’re taking carbines and 9 mm pistols so we’re uniform and can each load out of the other’s kit. I want vests, web gear, and those North Face daypacks along with the water camels. Finn, help her. Ava, load magazines as Finn gets med kits, MREs, and compasses. We have to travel light, so don’t over-pack. Take several packs of socks each. There’s unisex clothes on the shelves over there in sizes medium and large. Take two pairs of pants and shirts each; we’ll wear the dirty ones during the night when we move and the clean to sleep in. You’ll have to do without underwear because there isn’t any that will fit you. Hurry, hurry,” he urged.